INTRODUCTION
This short anthology of prose and poetry, which marks and
complements Plymouth Arts Centre's 'Beat Generation Weekend' (6 & 7 June 1987).
is also intended as a publication independent of this particular event.
Reminiscing and celebratory it certainly is and. inevitably (and in both senses)
partial.
On The Road, Howl and The Naked Lunch, all
first published in the Fifties, have lasted indeed outlasted, most of their
fiercest denigrators while Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, who spearheaded
that 'movement' the literary critics saddled them with, have had the last laugh.
Those critics (and critics, concerned as they are with creating or sustaining
hierarchies, generally tend towards elitism) who disliked the democratic
openness of the Beats, initially found it easy to heap abuse upon writers whose
styles both written and lived so differed from their own. The Beats'
classlessness derided as ignorance or facile anarchy, their frankness condemned
as obscenity, their freshness and pace mistaken for illiteracy, and their
self-explorations and autobiographical approach labelled 'indulgence', these
writers had much to contend with and the casualty lists (also true of the modern
jazz musicians) were inevitably heavy. Indifference, hostility, ridicule in some
cases, belated fame and notoriety in others, claimed all too many victims.
Chief among them was the Beat Generation's most important
figure and (in the UK at least) the most misunderstood and undervalued Jack
Kerouac. If this book, like the events of the Weekend, emphasises his particular
influence or constantly refers back to Kerouac's contribution to post-War
writing, that seems only fitting. And it should be stressed that Kerouac and
many of his friends and fellow-writers. University-educated or not, were very
literate men who read widely and deeply. Kerouac knew and loved his Shakespeare,
Blake, Joyce and Proust. And for that matter Melville, Rimbaud and the many
ancestors and influences he acknowledged, from classics to contemporary masters.
(These include Thoreau, Whitman, London, Hamsun, Wolfe, Cιline, Saroyan, Algren
and the ever-controversial Henry Miller, then in his sixties, who enjoyed much
of what Kerouac was writing and said so.)
No artist, however original, can afford not to learn from
the chain of tradition. This the wonderful Dexter Gordon, trailblazer and
survivor, whom Kerouac listened to and admired, knows well. Gordon, now in old
age receiving his true measure of applause, reaching via Bertrand Tavernier's
film Round Midnight and those superb Blue Note reissues a larger,
younger audience than ever before, tells a story about himself aged 13:
"I didn't know anything about making music, but the
knowledge I had in my head was really broad; my thing was already forming. I was
listening to all the bands, everybody I could, and I'd go around where the cats
were, when the bands came into town, and I'd carry someone's horn into the
dance. Later on, I would let Sonny Rollins and Jackie McLean do the same for me,
when they were kids. I knew where they were, 'cause I'd done the same thing
myself."
A generous openness of spirit, along with that sense of
continuity expressed by all genuine artists even as they affirm their own
individuality such emotional links are manifest in the best Beat writing:
that's what should be celebrated and what new, younger generations are now
enthusiastically discovering for themselves. And a perceptive British literary
historian like Jim Burns is here, and has been for years, pointing out such
things. We shouldn't, for instance, be fooled by recent fashionable bits of
bookmaking like The Hip, a coffee-table volume, albeit with some nice
pictures and subtitled "Hipsters, Jazz and The Beat Generation". For how can
such a concoction omit the likes of Terry Southern, Burroughs, Gysin, Brossard,
the Landesmans, R. Crumb, Huncke and so many others who helped shape or
contributed to the Hip sensibility as those upon whom space is squandered (e.g.
Sade singer not Marquis, Kid Creole, Tom Waits, Paul Weller et al) did
not? And I wish the British public would read all those excellent American
authors whose works and lives have had much to do with the Hip and the Beat,
loners though they may be and categories though they may resist: John Fante,
Charles Bukowski, Chandler Brossard. John Clellon Holmes, Alan Harrington, Paul
Bowles, Hubert Selby.
If the names mentioned seem to imply predominantly male
preserves (though not necessarily with homosexual or chauvinist connotations),
it must be admitted, feminism aside, that those women poets of the time
characterized as 'Beat' were none too memorable. Perhaps only Denise Levertov
and Fran Landesman, the poet-lyricist who wrote some much-recorded standards (Ballad
of the Sad Young Men; Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most, etc) still
deserve wider recognition. Many years later, however, the women prose-writers
have been producing fascinating and highly readable memoirs and autobiographical
fiction by way of setting the record straight. Try, for example, Heart Beat
by Carolyn Cassady, Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson, Common Soldiers
by Janet Richards. Or Bonnie Bremser's For Love Of Ray, Diane di Prima's
Memoirs of a Beatnik and Jan Kerouac's Baby Driver. (Edie Kerouac,
too, is now at work on a memoir. You'll Be Okay.) Illuminating, honest
and worth anyone's time. Students of the era will also find such books full of
courage, humour and perception rare enough qualities in our new Cold War
epoch.
So much Beat writing sprang from reaction against
insensitivity and materialism whether rooted in politics, literature or within
individuals. Creating any art-form involves communicating and surviving,
searching for an impossible permanence in a very brief human span. A most
eloquent and enduring survivor, one late great jazz legend now no longer with us
in the flesh, movingly closed his own book. He summed up the spirit of what
Kerouac too might have expressed were he himself here today:
"As for the future physically, emotionally, I can't work
very much. I can't take much pressure, but I do have to survive, and I do still
want to play. I do still need to be accepted as an artist. But I want to be more
than just a 'jazz player' playing. I want to make the people forget the
categories and hear what's really happening. I want to make them feel the joy or
sadness. I want to make them open up and listen. That's what I've always wanted.
I'll do the best I can." (Art Pepper: Straight Life, Schirmer Books USA.
1979)
A.L.
